


The Magician’s Path

by echomoon



Category: The Magicians (TV), The Magicians - Lev Grossman
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Canon Rewrite, F/F, F/M, M/M, Multi, Polyamory, Slow Burn, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, combination of book and show canon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-11
Updated: 2018-04-11
Packaged: 2019-04-21 14:59:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,324
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14287434
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/echomoon/pseuds/echomoon
Summary: In a universe where your soulmate’s first words to you are written on your skin, Quentin Coldwater gets accepted to Brakebills and learns to be a Magician. A complete canon rewrite, combining both book and show canon on the book timeline. Eventual Penny/Kady/Julia/Quentin, with soul marks between only two of the individual pairs, because love doesn’t have to have a mark to be valid.





	The Magician’s Path

**Author's Note:**

> Hello friends, here is the beginning of my very long rewrite project. I’ve been very excited about sharing this with everyone and I really hope y’all like it. If you have any questions about the universe changes I’ve made, feel free to comment and ask! Some of it will be spoilers but a lot of it is minor changes that I can absolutely answer about. And as always, feel free to join us in FTB at https://discord.gg/tcWB34e

Quentin slides open the door of his dorm room and stops short. There’s a hot guy sitting on the previously empty bed on the other side of the room, rifling through a bag. The hot guy looks up at Quentin with an amused look on his face, which slides off almost immediately.

“Oh, it’s you,” he says, and Quentin is struck with two panicked thoughts:

The first: that this is the man he sat next to during the test, which is probably why he looks so annoyed to see Quentin - and honestly, anyone whose test started changing randomly would look at the test of the person next to them, it’s not his fault this was his first exposure to magic - and the second: that this man had just said Quentin’s words.

And holy fuck, does that second thought take up most of his mind. He gapes at the man, his thoughts a repeating stream of: _he said my words, I don’t want this, why did he say my words, no one should say my words_.

The man’s face is a mix of sour and expectant, but Quentin can’t bring himself to speak. This is quite literally what he’s been dreading his entire life. What can he say next that fate would deem worthy of being tattooed on someone’s skin? He can feel himself getting the urge to speak, isn’t sure what’s going to come out, sure that he’s about to ruin his life, and -

The door slides back open with a bang; Eliot and a stunningly beautiful woman enter, laughing at something.

“Quentin! This is the interruption you’ve been waiting for,” Eliot says.

“Hi, I’m Margo,” the woman says, but she’s facing Penny, eyeing him.

“This is _him_ ,” Eliot says, gesturing to Quentin like he’s some sort of object that he’s trying to sell.

“Hmm,” Margo says, turning to face him and looking him over pompously, and Eliot takes over eyeing Penny. “He’s not _that_ cute.”

Quentin blushes; Eliot looks back at Margo and says, “Whatever, Bambi. C’mon, first year, time for your tour.”

Quentin shoots a panicked look at Margo, who is looking disinterestedly at her nails, and then Penny - forgetting his still there panic about the Words - who just shrugs at him. Eliot rolls his eyes, grabs Quentin by the arm, and pulls him out of the room.

Penny is gone by the time Quentin comes back.

-

The first few weeks at Brakebills go like this:

Quentin watches from across the room as Penny falls in with a punk-looking girl, Kady, and ignores the panic and weird tightness in his chest that he feels whenever he sees the man. He isn’t going to deal with this yet; if he ignores him, maybe it will go away. But he can’t help but watch Penny, feel drawn to him. The feeling isn’t going to make him actually talk to the man, though. Not anytime soon.

He spends most of his time studying the absurd amount of languages and hand movements - Poppers - that the school requires of him; what little free time he has left is spent in the company of Eliot and Margo, whose main priorities seem to be partying and talking shit about anyone who isn’t a ‘Physical Kid’ like they are. He barely spends any time in his dorm room, which is a boon when it comes to avoiding Penny, instead staying the night at the Physical cottage or, on occasion, falling asleep in one of the study rooms.

-

Penny never expected love out of a soul mark. Sure, society pushed that marks always led to perfect little happily-ever-afters, but Penny lived in reality. He had seen the fallout of fluked matches, had lived the fallout of a so-called perfect match turning out to be not so perfect after all.

There was a reason he had spent most of his life since he got his on the road.

And frankly, his mark was so fucking weird there was no chance of anyone ever saying it to him. Quentin’s little freak out the first time they talked? No offense to the nerd, but there was no way whatever was going to eventually come out of his mouth would match the mark on Penny’s hip, even if the handwriting was similarly shitty.

So Penny was just going to wait out the other man’s panic until it turned into a fluke. Not that it really mattered overall - he has a pretty good thing going with Kady, and getting along with his roommate is not high on his list of priorities when said roommate isn’t even spending time in their dorm.

He could just do without the constant stream of panic sirening its way into his head whenever Quentin was within his range, is all.

-

It’s normal for Quentin to dream about Fillory, but the dream he has that night is an especially strange one. He’s in Fillory, following a strange living stone path in the woods that shifts color and shape with every step. He doesn’t know how he knows its Fillory, as there are none of the usual landmarks - or at least, he doesn’t know until he reaches a mausoleum with a girl sitting on the top.

It’s Jane Chatwin, and she starts to talk to him about Fillory, as if there’s anything he doesn’t know about it - she hops down from where she is sitting, says a phrase that, for some reason, he keeps hearing everywhere, and grabs his wrist, pushing his hand up against a glowing sigil on the mausoleum front; it burns, like he’s stuck his entire hand into a fire, and then suddenly he’s awake and falling out of bed and clutching his hand because it _still fucking burns_. He stares at his hand in horror, and all he can think besides ‘ow, fuck’ is that phrase Jane Chatwin said before she burned him, so no one can blame his sleep addled, pain influenced mind for forgetting what happens next:

Penny, either half asleep or half drunk, rolls over in his bed, where he definitely had not been when Quentin was last awake, faces where Quentin is currently resting, and says, “What the fuck, dude.”

And all Quentin does is clutch the wrist of the burned hand, not remembering that he never wanted to talk to Penny, his brain not even processing what is going on, looks up, and says:

“What the _fuck_ is the garden path?”

before passing back out, splayed across the floor.

-

Penny stares at his roommate, shocked sober by what he just heard. Over the sheets, his hands are clutching his hip, instinctively covering the words that lay there. He spends what feels like hours staring at the man, before stumbling out of bed as well to find the person he had only just parted from.

He and Kady were not soul mates, but they were way more compatible than either would care to admit out loud. They were drawn to each other through sex, sure, but that first hookup had, for whatever reason, given him a rush of intimacy that no other one night stand had. They just stuck together after that, two fucked up hearts gravitating toward the most broken person in the room. With his head spinning, he seeks her out.

-

Sex with Kady is enough of a pleasant distraction that he almost forgets about what just happened - or at least until shortly after they finish, when Kady rests her arm across his waist and asks if he’s okay.

“Why wouldn’t I be,” he replies, giving her a satisfied grin.

She laughs, but moves her hand on top of his where he’s been absentmindedly rubbing his hip. “You keep touching your mark.”

He gives a short hum in reply, turns away to look at the wall. “I have a lot of tattoos, Kady.”

“Alright,” she sighs, and even though he can’t read her mind he can tell she’s hurt. “I get it. Subject change.”

“No, its -” Penny says, immediately frustrated by his inability to talk about things. Normally? Not a problem. But with Kady… he wanted, for some probably stupid reason, to be close to her. And since he would be stuck at Brakebills for the next few years anyway, giving in to the impulse he would normally ignore was… a difficult thing to do, but one he was going to risk. “Someone said my words.”

“Oh, fuck. Who?” Kady says, sitting up. The sheet slides off her naked body, but she doesn’t move to fix it.

Penny shakes his head. “He doesn't want it. The marks. A soul mate. Any of it.”

“He said that?”

“No. I - okay.” Penny sits up as well. “I - hear voices.”

“Okay, like, psychic?”

“God, I hate that word.”

“Then mindslut.” She kisses his cheek. “Penny, babe, you aren’t the first I’ve met. You aren’t even the first to get in my pants.”

He rolls his eyes, smiles a little at her. “He was so fucking, panicked, when I said his words. He wouldn’t even talk to me. I don’t think he even realized he spoke to me tonight, he fucking passed out right after it happened.”

Penny doesn’t really understand why he’s so upset about it. His whole life had basically been constant rejection - this wasn’t anything new.

“And you’re sure he said your words? It’s not a fluke?” Kady says, rubbing his arm.

“They’re pretty fucking specific.” Penny finally moves his hand away from the chicken scratch on his hip. She examines it.

“Huh. Well that just fucking sucks. You want me to beat him up?”

And from anyone else Penny would just be annoyed, but he knows that she’s genuinely trying to be comforting.

“Yeah, that would be helpful,” he replies, just to rile her up.

“Hey, I know battle magic,” she says seriously. “And Krav Maga. Pick your poison.”

He shakes his head, smiles at her, and she drops the serious.

“Besides,” she says, lightly smacking his chest, “I just fucked your brains out, isn’t that help enough?”

“I don’t think it worked well enough, we might have to try again,” he says, and moves to push her back down onto the bed. She gives in easily to his kiss.

-

The burn on Quentin’s hands heals essentially overnight but leaves a thick scar. Or what looks like a scar, anyway. It doesn’t impede his movement at all, but he has experience with scar tissue and it looks like very deep, healed over cuts. He ends up tearing apart an old t-shirt to make makeshift bandages. As he covers it, he tries to follow the niggling thought in his mind that the sigil looked familiar.

It takes him most of the next day to figure it out - specifically, it takes running into Alice after class to realize that he had seen the sigil in one of Alice’s books when he passed her in the library ages ago. Explaining the situation to her proves difficult when she’s so agonizingly defensive towards anyone who tries to talk to her, but unwrapping his palm to show her the scar ends up being enough to get her to listen.

Alice explains what the sigil is for, tells him about the ritual she read about and now, in the face of him coming to her with the sigil, wanted to perform.

Quentin doesn’t understand how his dream about Fillory is connected to a ghost summoning, but hey, it’s magic. Since when has that ever made sense?

They need to wait until the next full moon to perform it, which is a few weeks away, but the wait gives them time to prepare the ingredients, so it works out. Quentin is in charge of the easy to find stuff - he would be offended, but, it’s Alice. She’s just like that.

-

First years have no choice in classes, and they’re stuck together for all of them. Apparently, once they get sorted into disciplines and start to focus on specializing, things will change, but for now they’re just doing basics.

Alice, before one of their morning classes one day, says to Quentin, “Distract Penny after class, I need to talk to Kady about something for - the project - and they always leave too quickly.”

“I can’t do that,” he replies immediately.

“Why not? He’s your roommate, just bother him about cleaning his side of the room or something,” she says, eyeing him like he’s being stupid.

He really doesn’t want to admit to her why he won’t talk to Penny.

“I - whatever,” he says, and slinks away before she can command anything else from him, choosing a seat closer to the back than normal.

-

Professor Moretti walks into the classroom with an arm full of books, which he drops on the table with a bang. He waves off the bored looks from the students in the front.

“No, don’t worry, these are for the class after you. Has everyone gotten to Popper 25 by now? Yes? Good, because if you haven’t, you’re going to be stuck in Practical for a very long time later. Now, since you have that to look forward to, I decided that instead of the scheduled curriculum, we will let your surely overworked minds take a rest and discuss some light theory instead.” He turns to the chalkboard and writes out ‘Soul Marks’ in big letters.

Half the class groans; a few students lean forward in their seats.

He starts his lecture, starting with information that really isn’t new at all to Quentin. Apparently magicians hadn’t had any more luck than scientists figuring out how the Marks worked. Quentin starts to zone out as the professor gets way too deep on a specific theory of a specific detail, one of the few things magicians have figured out; apparently he’s not the only one, because after fifteen minutes of the professor rambling about something none of them understand, he stops short, chuckling to himself.

“Ah, well, I’ll save the rest of that theory for the upper level classes. Let’s see, how many of you have common marks?”

Quentin raises his hand, as does the majority of the class. As he looks around he notices that Alice has her hand up and a particularly bitter look on her face, and that neither Kady nor Penny have their hands in the air.

The professor continues the lecture, but Quentin’s mind gets stuck on Penny’s lowered hand, and the thoughts that he wanted to avoid start to trickle in.

Statistically, 75% of marked pairs had one common and one uncommon. Flukes happened often, for the ones with common marks - Quentin had had a few over the years, which absolutely contributed to his anxiety about meeting his potential match. Quentin hoped with Penny’s mark being apparently uncommon, that this was just another fluke. He wasn’t ready for a match, was still, admittedly, sort of hung up on Julia, his first fluke and childhood friend. And now this situation with Penny... Quentin tossed the idea that this was a fluke around his head for the rest of the lecture. In all honesty, ignoring Penny for the next five years - especially since they would be rooming for two of them - would probably be impossible. Quentin’s schedule of sleeping literally anywhere else was becoming exhausting. And also, the idea that Penny of all people was his match? Seemed incredibly unlikely. The only way to move on from this would be to say something and get it over with. Accept the fluke and move on.

And with Alice’s insistence that he talk to Penny anyway, he has an excuse that gives him just enough courage to say something.

Catching Penny before he and Kady leave is easy enough - Quentin’s seat in the back gives him vantage to do that. His throat tightens as he moves closer to Penny - Kady is facing his direction, and pokes Penny into looking at him, which doesn’t help.

Penny glares at him, says in a flat tone, “What do you want.”

Quentin goes wide-eyed, sees Alice catch Kady’s attention and start whispering to her.

“Yo. I don’t have all day,” Penny says, snapping in front of his face.

“What did you, um, think about the - about Moretti’s lecture?” Quentin says, his brain frantically churning to piece together a sentence that isn’t complete gibberish. He’s horrified by what comes out, but hey. Words happened. Luckily he’s gotten to the ‘too frozen to process’ point of panicking.

Quentin can feel the long seconds tick past like prickles running down his back as Penny stares, until he finally speaks.

“That’s not what it says, so you can chill.”

And Quentin is simultaneously filled with embarrassment and relief. More staring happens; Quentin doesn’t really know what else to say. He’s glad it was a fluke, but also just, hates the whole situation up to and including now.

“Kady and Alice are almost done, you can leave now,” Penny says.

But before Quentin can reply, Penny continues, “How did I know? Quentin, your mind is so loud I can’t tune it out; everything you think is so boring I replace it with dubstep. Work on your wards… roomie.”

“What’s dubstep?” Quentin replies dumbly, and immediately cringes because _what the hell, brain, why was that the first thing you say?_

Penny scoffs, rolls his eyes. “Leave, idiot.”

So Quentin does.

-

“Did you know that Penny is psychic?” Quentin asks Alice when he runs into her in the hallway. She looks annoyed with him, but that smooths out when he speaks.

“Oh. So he…”

“Yeah. Get what you need?”

“Yeah.”

They both stare at nothing, saying nothing, for an awkward moment, and then abruptly part ways.

-

Nothing happens for a while, beyond class and studying. Quentin stops avoiding Penny - they aren’t anywhere close to being buddies at this point, but it’s no longer excruciatingly awkward to be in the same room anymore.

But for the first time since their conciliation, Quentin isn’t in the room by nightfall. Penny doesn't necessarily care - it means Kady can stay around longer, even if they're just studying instead of fucking - but it's still weird. Quentin is a very habitual person, and somehow over the weeks Penny got used to that. He really doesn’t want to admit it, but when eleven rolls around and Quentin still isn’t back, he starts to get worried.

And when a familiar voice, once he hasn't heard since the day of the entrance exam, pops back into his head, telling him to go to a specific disused classroom-turned-storage room, well. Shit’s shady, and he's more relieved than surprised to find Quentin there.

“We were sent here to find _these_ nerds?” Kady asks him, taking in the spread of ingredients and books strewn between Quentin and Alice, both cross-legged on the floor mid-preperation.

“Sent? Who -” Quentin starts, and stops when both Penny and Kady roll their eyes at him.

“So, what, you need a hand or something?” Penny asks, as if he already knows the answer.

“It says we need four people. Each one a magical adept. And here they are,” Alice says, reading from the book. “Please, come sit down. This is perfect timing.”

-

After the failed summoning ritual, Alice throws herself back into her studies, goes back to ignoring Quentin outside of academics; Quentin sulks a bit, goes back to spending time in the cottage, but still comes back to the dorms at night. Penny wants to be annoyed, since it cuts into time that he and Kady could be having sex in the room, but he isn’t. And Kady isn’t either, is fine just hanging around.

“And besides,” she says when they talk about it, “we can always just start fucking whenever we want and he can leave if he doesn’t like it.”

“Exhibitionist,” Penny teases in response, ignoring his interest in the idea. Would they ever actually do that? Probably not, because Quentin was so fucking repressed, but it would be an interesting fantasy.

“Um, sorry, who’s the one who went down on me in the clock tower pavilion?”

“You liked it,” he says, and kisses her.

“I deny nothing,” she says, and they tumble into bed.

-

Penny and Kady weren’t exactly the most studious - neither ever felt the urge to board themselves up in the library until their brains burst from the amount of knowledge they tried to stuff into it, like some students - so most people saw them as slackers. But both had grown up rough, both learned to pick things up quickly. So while they did have to occasionally study the theory, the Poppers were easy enough for them to remember.

Quentin can’t help but be jealous that they spent so much time doing whatever they wanted while he spent all of his time studying - he wasn’t failing, but he wasn’t top of the class, either. He knows Penny can feel, or however his mind reading worked, his jealousy over the situation. He tries to push the feeling down, but ends up just feeling it more and more as their course load worsens. Along with fatigue, and frustration. Being off his meds doesn’t help him deal with the negative emotions very well either, even after his body got through the weaning process.

So Quentin, feeling like he’s going to scream when he can’t get the spell for the current Practical Applications assignment to work even though he’s been trying for hours, bursts from his desk as if moving somewhere will make it work, anger vibrating under his skin and his hands shaking. A few classmates shoot him concerned looks, but everyone is so focused on getting their own set of spells to work that no one does more than that. No one but Penny, who crosses the room, stands in front of where Quentin stands frozen with rage, and says,

“Show me what you were doing.”

Quentin doesn’t even look up at him, just powerlessly goes through the motions.

“Okay, do the middle part again. Yeah, you’ve got the wrong etude for these circumstances. Switch the first and third sections and you should be good.”

Penny goes back to his desk, where he and Kady had devolved into throwing bits of paper at each other instead of moving on to the next set of spells. Quentin takes a minute, then sits back down as well and tries what Penny said. It takes a few tries, but the spell works.

He slumps in his chair, some of his tension melting away. After a few minutes of just relaxing, he turns around.

 _Penny. Penny look up. Over here._ He shouts in his head, not sure how the psychic thing works but hoping this will get his attention.

Eventually, Penny looks up, his face creased with annoyance, and mouths _what_.

 _Thanks_ , Quentin mouths back.

Penny’s face uncreases, and he just waves him off as if to say whatever.

-

Gretchen, a first year who walks with a limp because of a permanently damaged leg she claims is the source of her power, falls into Woof Fountain. She says she was pushed and held under, but she was walking alone at the time. Luckily, a passerby helped her get out of the bottomless fountain before she drowned.

There is no investigation.

-

Quentin can never really figure out what motivates Penny to help him, especially when the rest of the time Penny treats him like an annoying hanger-on that he can barely tolerate. But Penny seems to be like that towards everyone, even Kady at times - civil one moment, intolerable the next. And honestly, every attempt he makes to befriend other first years just ends with them hating him - so basically the norm, like every other non-Julia friendship he’s ever tried to have. At least Penny, and Kady by extension, don’t completely hate him hanging around. Begrudging company is better than nothing.

-

Within the next month, two more students - a fourth year who had stopped for a smoke and a second year who thought she had found a quiet place to meditate - had been pushed into the fountain. Or, as the now popular theory claimed, had been pulled.

There were rumors that the fountain was a portal, that someone on the other side was trying to pull people through. There were rumors that the fountain now housed a creature - a kelpie or mermaid were the popular ones - that was trying to drown people.

Three more students are pulled in trying to solve the mystery; one dies. The fountain is boarded up and warded off.

-

Kady decides to pelt Quentin with bits of paper while he’s studying - she has nothing better to do, finds bothering him funny. Quentin takes the onslaught for 15 minutes before finally getting up.

“Okay, okay, I get it,” he says, annoyed but also amused, assuming that she wants alone time with Penny. He grabs his books off the desk and leaves, flashing them a peace sign through the doorway before he closes it. Kady continues to throw paper as he leaves.

With him gone, she turns her attention to Penny. She readies another projectile; Penny turns to her and gives her a dirty look.

“Don’t,” he says, giving her a small smile.

She sticks her tongue out at him, then lies on her stomach across the bed so her head is closer to where he is sitting. They stay like that in silence for a while, Penny scribbling and cross-referencing the papers he has strewn across the floor, Kady watching.

“I don’t get it,” she says finally.

“What, the equation? I thought you finished this already.”

“Yeah no, I did. I mean Quentin.”

Penny stills, so she tries to explain better.

“I mean, he’s not the worst?” She says, running a hand across his shoulders. “But like, why are you doing this to yourself?”

“I’m not doing anything to myself,” he says, leaning back onto the bed. “I can’t control him being my roommate.”

“Yeah, but you can control him hanging around all the time. Just…” she tries to backpedal a little. “You can do what you want, and he’s starting to grow on me a little to be honest, but are you sure…?”

“Not really, no,” Penny sighs. He’s quiet for a minute; Kady lets him think. “I guess I just want to see why magic thinks he’s right for me.”

“... Do you want to talk about it at all?” She’s uncomfortable with emotions, all things considered - it’s part of why they get along - but for Penny she would put up with it.

“Do I ever?” He says flatly. “Nah, it’s. Whatever happens, I’ll just deal. On va voir or whatever the shit. Besides, it’s just Quentin.”

Kady laughs, but feels a strange hollowness in her gut telling her this isn’t going to end well.

-

Two weeks after Woof is closed down, every single window in the front of the Van Pelt building explodes outward. No one is in the courtyard except a few unlucky squirrels and birds, so no one is hurt. A week after that, the entire girl’s dorm building wakes up to find every available surface covered in tiny glass horses.

-

“It’s Charlie!” Alice yells, bursting into the room. She’s wearing a fluffy blue bathrobe, which she tightens self-consciously when she realizes everyone is staring at her.

Classes had been canceled that morning while the staff investigates the dorm. Quentin had been in the library when he found out, having gotten there early to grab something for a later class, and had gone back to his room to find Kady asleep in his bed and Penny meditating on the floor next to it.

“... Did you have sex in my bed?” Quentin asked as he took in the scene. Both were only half dressed, but that was normal for them; sometimes Quentin thought the couple would be nudists if they could get away with it.

“Nah, your bed was just closer to the door,” Penny replied, barely explaining the situation.

But Quentin just shrugged and went to his desk to study, where he still was when Alice burst in.

“Who’s Charlie?” Kady asks, her head hanging off the edge of the bed. She had just woken up a bit before, and had decided to practice throwing sparks at the ceiling.

“My brother?” Alice says, and Quentin remembers her explaining this when they were prepping the ritual. When he’s the only one who seems to understand, she sighs and continues, “The ghost we were summoning?”

“Huh, guess why that didn’t work,” Kady says. “Niffins ain’t ghosts, babe.”

“I- whatever, Kady. You have to help me bring him back.”

“I don’t have to do anything,” Kady says, her eyes narrowing.

Penny nods. “Hard pass.”

Quentin, though, doesn’t really know how else to respond, so he just goes with it.

-

The niffin lies suspiciously low during the days it takes Alice to prepare her spell; Dean Fogg, after two days of an endless stream of teachers and alumni observing the girl’s dorm, clears the building. The naturals and psychics, who had opened their doors to the displaced students during the incident so the women would have somewhere to stay, keep their doors open for those who are wary to move back in just yet. Kady opts to stay in Quentin and Penny’s room, where she practically lives at this point anyway.

Alice and Quentin spend those days in the library, figuring out how to bind a niffin. They find many ways to trap it in a container, but those are all permanent - at most, it could be used as a power source once trapped. Alice is intent on finding a way to temporarily trap him, or bind him to her personally. There’s no cure for being a niffin, but with her devotion to her brother, if anyone could figure out a cure it’s Alice. Quentin buries himself in helping her, liking the feeling of being useful.

In the dead of night, under the waning sliver of the moon and thick fog, they sneak off to Woof Fountain.

Alice is right about the niffin being her brother, but also wrong about it being her brother. The image of him, sure, but not the personality; Quentin can see no relation between the niffin in front of him and the story he heard of a boy who killed himself trying to help a friend. She tries to bind him with the spell she cobbled together and all Quentin can do in the end is bind the niffin to the box he had promised her he wouldn’t bring.

Quentin is pretty sure Alice is never going to talk to him again.

-

“Huh, still alive then,” Kady observes when Quentin shuffles back into the room.

Quentin kicks off his shoes and falls into his bed face first, letting out a groan.

“Aww, does baby need to cry?” she mocks.

Quentin flicks her off and pulls a pillow over his head to muffle her laughter.

-

As expected, Alice refuses to do so much as look at Quentin after everything, leaving him once again with the choice of having no one or hanging around Penny and Kady, who at best seem to tolerate him. He wants to just shrug it off, tired of Alice’s hot and cold act, but at least when she came to him for help he felt useful. Now, even after saving her life, he just feels used. But he should be used to this by now - even with his friends before Brakebills he was second best; Julia never loved him, just pitied him, stuck by him because she knew he would have no one else if she left. Here, no one has the obligation of being a childhood friend - no one feels forced to stick around someone so intolerable.

There’s a sharp pain in his head as someone grabs his hair and tugs on it hard.

“Quentin, either learn how to strengthen your wards or leave the fucking room ‘til you’re done moping. I’m sick of your ‘woe is me’ shit clogging up my head,” Penny says, his tone taking the aggressive edge off his words.

Quentin just nods numbly, not even able to think after that, recovering from the sharp jolt that went through his body. Penny stares at him, shakes his head, and goes back to his side of the room.

The next day there’s a book on mental wards on his bed.

-

The first semester ends, months having gone by too slowly but too quickly. It’s marked by a flurry of exams and the loss of two classmates who flunked out, whose names Quentin can’t even remember. They have the option to go home for a week, though the timing is strange in Brakebills time and barely close to any kind of holiday in the outside world. Quentin goes home and realizes how boring his life was before magic. He drifts aimlessly around his house, barely interacting with his family. He thinks about going to find Julia, but she’s still in regular school, so busy with her schedule that even if he tried to talk to her he doubted she would have the time. The week goes by too slowly; Quentin spends most of it basically staring at the clock, waiting for the second his portal back to Brakebills will open.

-

The second semester starts with an assigned group project, to be presented at the end of the quarter. The first years are given cards with a room number on it; inside the room they meet both their group and their third year mentor. Quentin is alone in the room for a while, before his first teammate, Surendra, arrives, then, very late as per usual, Penny and Kady together. It seemed the three were not yet meant to split; Quentin is relieved to know at least those two, even though they don’t care much for him. Anything is better than a room full of strangers - or worse, being paired with Alice.

Their mentor is a sleepy-looking psychic girl who introduces herself as Olive. She gives them a brief overview of their project - that they need to build a portal to a location of their choice - hands them a stack of charmed notebooks with the instructions to ‘start brainstorming’, and then falls asleep in the corner of the room.

-

In addition to the group project, the first year course load is greatly increased. Even Penny and Kady start to actually study more. Their group takes to using the project room for regular studying as much as for the actual project - any time not spent in class or the library is spent there.

The group doesn’t exactly bond - Kady and Surendra don’t get along whatsoever, since the apparently well-off boy said something disparaging towards her and Penny’s more apparently ‘low class’ aesthetic, and because of that Quentin ends up being the go between for him and the couple. Beyond that, the constant proximity makes the group bond beyond the bare threads of association they had started with.

Penny and Quentin already have a strange, silent agreement to help each other on occasion, but mostly just tolerate each other. Sure, Penny was antagonistic, often, but Quentin was starting to fully acknowledge that that was just the way he was, that it wasn’t Quentin personally. If anything, he tolerated Quentin more than anyone else on campus but Kady. They had grown into an easy cohabitation.

Even Kady had started to warm up to Quentin - she started to willingly teach him how to meditate and strengthen his mind, though that may have been because Penny wouldn’t stop complaining about it - no matter how hard Quentin tried, Penny was still able to hear him.

-

Setting up a portal to outside of Brakebills is impossible when inside the wards, so they decide instead to set theirs up on either side of the Sea - a long enough distance that it should be appropriate. When they ask Olive if it would be enough, she just shrugs, and then warns them to test it with an animal first. The thought of what a miscast portal could do to a human is not very encouraging, especially since they would need to use a human for their presentation.

They borrow a couple of mirrors from one of the storage rooms, set them up across the field with linking runes and all the other preparations needed to get the portal to work. At first, it’s Kady and Penny on one side, and Quentin and Surendra on the other, until they realize that Penny is absurdly good at portal magic and Surendra is absurdly bad and switch pairings to even that out.

Regardless, the early test bunnies come out in various stages of messed up: one a bloody mess, one with limbs rearranged, one that somehow got spliced with what may have been a squid of some sort, one that seemed fine until it opened its mouth, let out an otherworldly scream, and disintegrated, and quite a few that just never came back.

The group has two weeks left before they need to present, everyone high-strung and panicking, when they finally get it right. They run the portal a few more times to be sure, and even take the bunny to the infirmary to get it checked out, but they finally built a functional portal.

They go to a Physical cottage party to celebrate.

-

Once they present their project, the year turns into a flurry of final exams. The trio continue to study together, Surendra leaves them for his actual friends.

Kady can’t quite wrap her head around the boys’ relationship - how Penny is so tolerating of Quentin, why he’s willing to let him get so close. And for Penny, it is close. Kady and Quentin are the only two people he regularly talks to, spends time with. Kady doesn’t kid herself that the three of them are friends, but they’ve become companions. Somehow, the boys had grown on her. She just hopes that when it ends, it isn’t messy.


End file.
